The Bad Movie Bible: The Ultimate Modern Guide to Movies That Are So Bad They’re Good, Rob Hill (Art of Publishing 2017)

(This is a guest-review by Pablo Magono)

There are good movies and bad movies. Among the latter, there are “movies so bad that you might think Adam Sandler was responsible for them, but so funny it won’t be for long.” That’s the simple premise behind The Bad Movie Bible. It’s easy to read, very funny, and full of information, posters, interesting screen-grabs, prize quotes, and sizzling starlets flashing flesh.

And as if that weren’t enough, the icing on the cake is that The Bad Movie Bible is itself mildly infected by Bad-Movie-itis. There are repeated references to a mysterious “right of passage” and the publisher’s address is given as “Bloosmbury”. Is this part of the joke? No, I don’t think so. It’s just a reminder that to err is human. But to err as badly as some of the movies here might be superhuman. Literally so, because Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is one of the entries in the “Science Fiction & Fantasy” section.

Elsewhere there are sections for “Action” and “Horror”, plus a grab-bag section called “The Rest” that collects everything from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) and The Room (2003) to Empire of the Ants (1977) and Double Down (2005). All movies get ratings out of 10 for five essential filmographic categories: “Cheese”, “Acting”, “Excess”, “Ineptitude” and “What?” (“reflecting the movie’s propensity to offer up moments of baffling wonder”). The higher the mark, the badder-better that aspect of the movie. Then there’s an overall “BMB Rating”, again out of 10, which doesn’t necessarily reflect the average score on the other categories. Some movies are more than the sum of their parts, some are less.

The best of the baddest are also accompanied by interviews with stars, stuntmen or those who rescued them from oblivion. For fetid fans of scuzz-cinema, this book should provide many happy hours first of reading, then of watching its recommendations. But could anything ever live up to the promise of a title like Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977)? Or Kung Fu Cannibals (1982)? In the latter case, apparently it could: the movie, better-known as Raw Force, gets a BMB Rating of 10, despite an average rating of 8.4 on the other categories (only “What?” is 10/10). The horror movie Things (1989) also gets a BMB Rating of 10, but its average score on the sub-categories is 9.6 – it gets 10/10 for “Acting”, “Excess”, “Ineptitude” and “What?”, but “Cheese” is 8/10.

That makes Things the baddest-bestest in the book. For Rob Hill, anyway. It’s not his favourite movie in the book, mind, but he knows what he’s talking about. He has a lot of knowledge, with enthusiasm and wit to match:

Miami Connection is an extremely positive movie that preaches tolerance and the need to accept people from all walks of life. Unless they’re drug-dealing motorcycle ninjas. (Miami Connection, 1987) … Writer / director Amir Shervan doesn’t stumble around the fringes of incompetence: he jumps right into the middle of it and does a jig. (Samurai Cop, 1991) … During the following night the sword is blown out of Christie’s closet on fishing wire by a wind machine. (Ninja III: The Domination, 1984) … Just like its star, Deadly Prey has been honed, buffed and oiled to within an inch of its life, then stripped virtually naked and released into the wild. (Deadly Prey, 1987) … The best teenagers-get-eaten-by-radioactive-plankton-fed-mutant-human-hybrid-flying-fish movie ever made. (Creatures from the Abyss, aka Plankton, 1994) … The apparent lack of any traditional cinematic luxuries (posh stuff like a tripod to keep the camera steady) makes this hard to watch at times. … But there’s something about it. If we’re honest, that something might just be a sexually promiscuous doll. It’s hard to say. (Black Devil Doll from Hell, 1984) … Ben & Arthur is a personal and heartfelt glimpse into the world of writer / director / star Sam Mraovich. His world is batshit crazy. (Ben & Arthur, 2002) … It must be hard for a man surrounded by Bee Gees to look like the smug one. Peter Frampton has a real talent for it. (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1978)

Hill also has space for some “deliberately cheesy” movies like The Ice Pirates (1984) and Traxx (1988). He includes them because he thinks they’re not as knowing as they wanted to be: “Just because there are deliberate attempts to ape schlock, it doesn’t mean there can’t be inadvertent schlock, too.” Movies like this are “good-good, bad-bad and good-bad all at the same time.” But most of the book is given over to movies that are genuinely so-bad-they’re-good. With possible exceptions like the following, which might be so-bad-it-should-have-been-burned:

After watching an ordinary scuzzy movie, you may well be left wishing you could bleach your eyeballs. After watching Night of the Necrophile, you may well be left wishing that eyeballs had never been invented. This movie doesn’t merely plumb unprecedented depths of depravity, bad taste and offensiveness: it finds depths below the depths, and then depths below those. The ineptitude and amateurishness merely add an extra shot of slime to the whole fetid cocktail.

But the ineptitude doesn’t extend far enough. You can’t take refuge in an incoherent or non-existent plot, because the noxious narrative is all too appallingly evident and easy to follow. Gypsy criminals Gran Voio (played by a cackling Eric Napolito) and his dwarvish cousin Piccolo Psico (Samuel Tegolare) are hired by the black-clad, mask-wearing Doktor Nekro (Victor Queresco), a Nazi scientist / war-criminal who’s been hiding out in the badlands of southern Italy since the end of the war. He needs their help to collect a fresh batch of young female corpses for his perverted experiments in reanimation. The toxic trio set off in a refrigerated truck, committing brazen street-murders to source their stock or sneaking into municipal mortuaries and loading the freshest and most attractive corpses into their necro-wagon.

Then, just as night falls and news comes over the radio of a heat-wave the following day, the truck breaks down on the winding mountain road that leads back to Doktor Nekro’s well-hidden lair. The refrigeration fails and the three depraved criminals are left with a stash of stolen stiffs that aren’t going to keep… I’d describe what happens next, but I’m worried that my keyboard would report me to the authorities. Suffice it to say that Doktor Nekro begins to commit medical infractions that the framers of the Hippocratic oath could never have anticipated – indeed, could never have imagined possible. […]

The mysterious and probably pseudonymous director is rumoured to have died shortly after completing the movie, possibly of shame, his body being shipped back to Romania for burial. In his absence, Night of the Necrophile was hastily edited and rush-released in a desperate attempt to stave off Sanguecine’s looming – and well-deserved – bankruptcy. Be warned. And then warned again. This is a movie that makes Things seem like Citizen Kane and The Gore Gore Girls seem like Bambi. Approach with extreme caution.

That’s not a typical movie here, but it helps make The Bad Movie Bible as varied as the real Bible. It’s “Bad to the Bon”!